Rabu, Desember 28, 2011

His score is fun and sometimes funny, but there’s actually a strong dramatic undercurrent through it all, the composer deftly reflecting the difficult relationship the audience needs to have with Murray’s character, hating him but at the same time believing that he could ultimately be turned around.

While the score is a little bit too bitty (it runs for about 33 minutes, made up of 21 tracks, many of those combined from even shorter ones) to be entirely satisfying on album, this new release is still an entertaining one, filling an important gap in the Elfman discography.Rating-nya tiga setengah bintang, baca lengkapnya di sini. Berikutnya dari Filmtracks, ini kutipannya:

Buy it... if you seek the origination point for many of the holiday and suspense techniques explored with far greater notoriety by Danny Elfman in Batman Returns and The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Avoid it... if you have long awaited an official release of this very short score and expect to hear more original music that compares favorably to the five minutes of outstanding, previously released highlights for full orchestra and choir.

While it's great to appreciate the score's lesser known portions on the limited 2011 product, it is difficult to recommend that album to an audience outside of Elfman's most supportive fanbase. There is definitely a sentimental place for this score, but be aware of the brevity of its highlights and full length. Rating-nya tiga bintang, baca lengkapnya di sini. Trakhir dari Film Music Magazine, berikut kutipannya:

among the soundtracks that have directly dealt with the holiday like “Edward Scissorhands,” “Batman Returns” “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “Family Man,” “Scrooged” just might take the gonzo antlers.

Sabtu, Desember 24, 2011

Scrooged would pose a challenge that Elfman had not previously faced. Most of the composer's collaborators up to this point had been younger, more experimental filmmakers for whom Efman had been more or less a peer. Richard Donner was a long-established director, comfortable with studio politics and experienced at working with composers. His prior musical collaborators included Jerry Goldsmith (whose score for Donner’s The Omen on an Academy Award) and John Williams (Superman). Donner had considered approaching Williams for Scrooged and needed to be convinced to use the up-and-coming Elfman.

Elfman’s agent, Richard Kraft made a cassette tape of cues from Beetlejuice, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and even Elfman’s early Forbidden Zone music for Donner: “Richard Donner finally spoke to me about it and I had my day in court to explain why Danny was so great. I eventually got them together and he was sold.”

Finding the proper musical tone on Scrooged would have presented a challenge for even the most experienced composer. The main character had to be seen as heartless, cruel, miserly, tasteless—but redeemable and likable. Earlier takes on the Dickens story all trafficked in macabre visions of ghosts, poverty and heartlessness, but Scrooged employed state-of-the-art makeup and visual effects to convey its horrors, and Donner had to up the ante to convey the shock of Frank Cross’s ultimate redemption to contemporary audiences. But Scrooged was still a comedy, and holiday comedy at that—for all its dark visions of frozen bums, dusty corpses and a man being burned alive, the movie needed to make audiences laugh and ultimately feel good about themselves.

Elfman’s main title immediately impressed Richard Donner. “I remember being on the recording stage on the first cue and all of us looking at each other and thinking, ‘Oh my God, he hit it.’ It was like hearing John Williams doing Superman and Goldsmith doing The Omen. I’ve really been fortunate in the composers I’ve worked with. Danny had a great sense of humor, and he was brilliantly not full of himself when he very well could have been. He was extremely flexible and a delight to work with.”

Donner says that hearing a composer’s original music for the first time can be daunting. “I don’t impose myself on people except just to give my thoughts—I think Danny was quite honestly ahead of us most of the time. But you hear the score in your head and also you do a temp score of ‘what’s the kind of feeling we want and what are you going to do?” and one of the dangers is you fall in love with the temp score. When the composer comes in, it’s difficult because you have a preconceived notion of what the score will be. Sometimes you hear something from the composer that’s so different that you either jump for joy and say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” or you try to steer them back to what the temp score sounded like. If I did have moments like that he was extremely cooperative and creative, and if I didn’t, he was way ahead of us.”

Donner’s desire for a “non-comedy” score had been fulfilled. “When you listen to the music from Scrooged,” the director says, “it had incredible overtones and if you just said it was a comedy score, it would be a big mistake—it was a brilliant score and it fit each and every scene and the emotions you were trying to get across, but it wasn’t a comedy score. Comedy scores—especially today—are overly huge and they’re used to punch up a joke or a bad line, but if you really listen to that score, it’s much more than a comedy score. It hits the emotions of Bill Murray’s character. I think Danny is so incredibly versatile—he’s a bit of a genius and he’s obviously proved it over the years.”

Who’d have thought that Danny Elfman would do one of his most inspired movie scores for a movie that didn’t really exist- let alone several at the same time? It’s this inventive, stylistic bounty that’s made me give a deserved mulligan to the Elfman soundtracks that you can only see live on stage at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood- home to Cirque Du Soleil’s movies-as-a-circus show “Iris.” With the music sending Cirque’s death-defying performers over audiences’ heads, trampolining off buildings, and contorting themselves into pretzels, Elfman’s work gives new meaning to being “in synch” with these moving human pictures. Ranging from furiously percussive symphonies to music box bells, solo pianos, syncopated voices and swing jazz, “Iris” not only traverses the amazing history of Elfman music with sections reminiscent of “Edward Scissorhands,” “Nightbreed” and “Dick Tracy,” but that of Hollywood scoring itself, with Elfman doing his own spins of “West Side Story”’s finger-snapping jazz to the raging dance ritual of “King Kong.” At once tightly controlled and spur-of-the-second, “Iris” brings out a new sense of invention and freedom from a composer who’s already one of Hollywood’s most inventive performers. “Iris” is a musical high wire act that Elfman pulls off with tremendous energy, and one definitely worth seeing in person.